All of the doulas I interviewed had participated in a two or three day intensive training, thought the content of that training varied tremendously. Some classes are led by formal organizations like the Doulas of North America, or Childbirth and Postpartum Professional Association, or toLabor, or ProDoula. Others are facilitated by community organizations, or even by campus initiatives specifically designed to train women of color doulas. Most of the doulas I interviewed identified strongly with our training institution, particularly those who had elected community based doula training, which were often imagined to index a commitment to women of color birthing bodies. For most doulas the training was an experience of self transformation, community building, and solidarity much more than it was an orientation to the physiology of labor, or the physical experience of birth. Faith, for example, described her training as organized around in her word spiritual and emotional connection. And she noted that her training transformed a group of strangers into what she called doula sisters, women she still texts every day to discuss challenging births, to share what she called doula stories, and to exchange affirming messages. Morgan described her training as quote "centered in traditional black practices from the black midwives." She said, "it was all just very centered in blackness. It was very centered in traditional black practices that have gotten lost throughout time from when the granny midwives would come from Africa and bring a lot of those practices here. We are the women who birthed an entire country. We have raised white babies, we birthed white babies, we birth our own babies." For Morgan, doula training was a return to a kind of native practice and a recognition of black women's long and powerful birthing histories. If professionalization debates constituted a battle over the ethics of the work itself, doulas also debated the lack of standardization in the field. Doulas are outliers in the larger field of birth work. Midwives and lactation consultants. the birth professions often associated with doulas, require substantial training, certification, and licensure, and thus they are expensive to enter. And many doulas noted that the costs associated with meeting credentialising mandates have made those professions unavailable to women of color. Miriam, who began her career as a lactation consultant, noted the impossibility of finding a black lactation consultant in Illinois because of the cost of certification, and the demands that she felt had been imposed only to the benefit of the fields credentialising bodies. Indeed, for some doulas, including Miriam, the growing visibility of doulas led to anxieties around possibilities for standardization, for uniform certification requirements that could exclude women of color, unleash further competitiveness, and make impossible what many women of color doulas I spoke to had been doing long before they even got trained, practicing doula work. Miriam suggested that any push towards standardization would simply serve the field's professional organizations, not birthing people, and especially not birthing black mothers. She said, "What happens with standardization is the one who can make the most money is the one who ends up on top. The one who has the highest credentials ends up on top. Making everybody ascribe to one standard is oftentimes the enemy of true equity." For those doulas who viewed birth work as a calling, the field's radical para professionalism affords them the opportunity to select clients who match their ethics, namely those who are imagined as most vulnerable to forms of birth violence. A number of women of color doulas articulated a preference for working with women of color clients or just guide their pro black orientation, a term Rihanna, one of my interlocutors, used. Samantha, for example, noted that she had not worked with a white client and she emphatically stated, "I don't feel safe with white women." Sydney suggested that women of color and white clients come to birth work with different agendas and aspirations, and that her practice aligned with the priorities of her women of color clients. She said, "Women of color and queer birthers need a doula for birth justice. White birthers use doulas because they want boutique birthing experiences." And Imani, who split her work between her solo practice and laboring for an agency, described her dislike of the agency's primarily affluent suburban white clients, even as she appreciated the steadiness of the work. She said, "The owner of the agency has completely catered to people in the suburbs. She's catered to that demographic, that socio economic status. Those are the clients. Those are their attitudes about who I am and what I am there to do, especially for postpartum clients. It tends to be like I'm there for servitude."